A Writer On Reading: Alberto Manguel

A few years back I chatted with Alberto Manguel, the accomplished writer and editor. We were discussing reading, particularly because he had just published a collection of essays about reading call, appropriately, A History of Reading.

Manguel is an articulate storyteller whose own life has always been full of books and literature, despite the fact that he left school early and never obtained a university degree. In his native Argentina, Manguel read to the blind Borges, and went on to Italy, France, and England to work in the publishing industry. In 1980 he came to Canada, and since developed an international reputation as a translator, anthologist, editor, and novelist.

Here are some snippets from our conversation.

---

"I had a vague idea that I wanted to investigate the place we came from as readers, and how it was that we became the readers we are now. So I started from certain aspects that I recognized from my own reading - the privacy, the memorizing aspects, the urge to possess books - and I looked at those and worked my way through stories that I knew by trying to find characters who could somehow be the model readers for that particular instance. But a lot had to do with chance. I did not know what I was going to find. I am not a scholar, I have no academic training and therefore whatever little knowledge I have is very erratic."

. . . .

"The geographical and chronological aspects of literature according to the writers seem to me arbitrary, and even more arbitrary is the literature that is based on the suppositions of what the writers intended - a history of literature that divides literature into social satire, novels for women, and so on. Those are things that a writer has decided, and in our time has been taken over by publicists who label a book in a certain way so that the bookseller knows where to put it on a shelf. That has nothing to do with how readers receive it. Readers decide otherwise, and there are very many books that are remembered as something else simply because the readers have decided that they would be something else."

. . . .

"Translation is one of the most intriguing, complex and rewarding forms of reading, but at the same time frustrating and all those other things I said. The essential problem with translation, I think, is that, number one, it forces you as a reader to read deeply and carefully. It also forces you to take the text you have read and put it into another language which did not create either that text or those ideas. I believe that much of what we say and think depends on the language in which we say and think it, so that we wouldn't be saying or thinking the same things if we changed languages. I certinaly notice when I change languages that other thoughts occur, and there are many things that I can't say naturally in one language that I would say naturally in another. In that sense translation remains an impossibility, but at the same time it is a record of the reader at his or her best."

Go To Page: 1

Articles in this Topic    Discussions in this Topic